Ramblings about knitting, life, exploits, and other things.

June 05, 2011

All done but the buttons

I've been secretly working on a wee pattern .... and since I've decided that I'm not going to fuss with submitting it for publication somewhere besides Fiber Dancers' own pages, I can haul off and show you the finished product.

This project was in response to a Ravelry Designers Group challenge. The cues were: Baby, Cables, Ocean.

Now, that's certainly not a glamour shot (and there will be some), but I wanted to get something up ...

I had a devil of a time getting the sleeves to come close to the body. Side to side intarsia cables is easy. But regular up and down intarsia cables that manage to mirror the sideways ones whupped up on me hard enough that I abandoned the effort. I'm thinking it may have had something to do with the tiny space I was working in (a whopping 24 stitches). Here's what I did instead:

And since I wasn't paying attention to the fact that the intended recipient of this sweater is reported to be a girl, and failed utterly to put the buttonholes in the right place, I came up with an alternative to actual buttonholes so that one button goes on each side....

As you can see, there will be fish buttons.

I'm trying to resist the urge to put fish buttons on the back -- it'll be visually great, but not so comfy for sleeping on --

So .. that's Cables by the Sea. I'm writing up the pattern, and will be doing a tutorial on intarsia cables, as well as one on that freaky little button loop I devised. (Only I would come up with a button loop that requires grafting stitches... ).